Reading is FUNdamental

I am currently reading three CS books. The differences in styles and approaches are striking, but they are all effective in teaching.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs aka SICP.

Classic text computer science and functional programming using Scheme as the implementation language. Used in 6.001 at MIT.

Related links:

• official mitpress site with html edition
• pdf version found on citeseerx
• mit video lectures
• online tutor

Programming Collective Intelligence

Interesting algorithms for mining the huge datasets available in the web era. Uses python as the implementation language. Working through the first three chapters, the first thing I did was rewrite the examples in perl. Then I found I wasn't the only one to do so.

• O'Reilly catalogue page

Modern Perl

chromatic has written a lovely book on Modern Perl, and shared the review copy for comments/editing. It was pretty sweet to email in some typos and receive a link back to an updated git repository with my changes applied.

• Modern Perl Books blog
• chromatic's blog post with a review copy.